9 Tips To Reduce Fleet Insurance Costs
With costs on the rise, insurance can become increasingly expensive for fleet managers.
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Now that we have covered the basics, we can progress to practical steps that you can take to reduce your business motor fleet insurance costs. The actions and steps details below will help reduce the risk to the fleet insurance company, in the world of insurance less risk equates or should equate to a lower policy premium.
1. Reduce Driver Risk Profiles
Working with your broker, agree on installing telemetric devices to record and analyse your drivers. Some devices need to be installed professionally and others can be downloaded to your phone, or plugged into a USB port. The last two are super easy to get operational and all provide you and your broker with valuable data on the driver's risk profile.
Adding the device will show the broker that you are keen to work with the broker and take the necessary steps to lower driver risk profile. If that information profiles your drivers as safe drivers, it will help reduce your costs. The converse is also true, if the recordings profile your drivers as higher risk, your premiums will increase.
However, before they increase, you can take steps to train your drivers on road safety and good driving habits. Some companies include rewards to further encourage safe driving. Long term, the company will not only benefit from lower premiums, but fleet vehicles will be spending much less time in repair or body shops.
2. Preventing Theft by Secure Parking and employ Immobilizers and Tracking devices
Vehicle theft is covered under both the third party fire and theft and comprehensive polices. If a vehicle is stolen and not recovered or damaged, the fleet insurance broker must cover the loss. By taking positive steps to reduce this risk you could earn an upfront discount, plus as your claims' history improves further future discounts when renewal time arrives.
It is always best to a take professional advice from your broker directly, who may refer you to a security specialist. The key steps will be improving or providing secure parking overnight. Fitting gadgets to reduce the risk of theft and whilst a tracking device will track a stolen vehicle it also serves as a big deterrent.
3. Provide Driver Training and Car Safety Equipment
If you are using telemetric devices, the information gathered on your drivers can be used to form the basis for ongoing training. The training should be aimed at improving any identified weaknesses and creating an employee wide awareness of the importance of safe driving. This is a key area to reducing your business fleet costs, and some companies will make employees responsible for the excess amount. That may be a bit extreme, but you should consider rewarding good drivers and penalising drivers that after warning and training still fail to improve.
4. Increase the Excess Amount
This is often referred to as a voluntary excess. When arranging cover, the broker will set a fixed excess amount, but it is open for negotiation. Remember, the excess amount is the amount that the fleet policy owner will be responsible for in the event of a claim.
Raising the voluntary excess will reduce the risk to the broker and should result in a cheaper quote. Setting a higher excess shows you are taking responsibility and will not be making small or minor claims. Within the company you can provide training or incentives to encourage responsible driving, also helping to lower the risk of future claims, which will help reduce your insurance further come renewal time.
5. Named Drivers only
Named driver cover will be less risk to the broker as they are able to factor in the risk posed by the named drivers. Having a literal "any driver fleet insurance" policy will permit anyone with a valid driving licence to drive. However, in practice, any driver cover will have restrictions. For example, any driver must be over 25 and have held a valid UK licence for a minium of 2 years. Even with these extra stipulations, an any diver policy will pose an unknown risk and will normally be more expensive than a named driver policy.
6. Ongoing Driver Training and incentive schemes
The price of fleet insurance will have a relationship to how many claims are made against the policy. If the number of claims are small or better still zero, you should be rewarded with future lower premiums. The savings can easily offset the investment made to improve the driving skills of your drivers.
7. Reward good driving
Incentivising good driving by rewarding drivers that have clean driving records can also help reduce the number of traffic related accidents.
8. Choose fleet vehicles in lower insurance risk groups
This is obvious, but choosing vehicles that are in high insurance groups will increase your fleet insurance costs. Vehicles are assigned into groups based on the cost of repair and replacement, and this must be reflected in the insurance premium. A good old reliable fleet of Honda's or Toyota's will always be cheaper than for example of fleet of BMW's.
9. Fleet risk management
Employ a fleet risk management software tool to improve to identify high risk areas and make improvements, end result is cost savings.